Bruno D'Britto left his home in Rio de Janeiro as a teenager, arriving in Nashua to join his father, who had left Brazil for the United States years earlier after his parents divorced. Coming to the U.S. was a chance to seek better opportunities, he said, and to leave a neighborhood beset by violence.

“I saw many people being shot. Like a month before I came (to the United States), this kid got shot, killed pretty much in front of my school as we were leaving. When you are living with that, you kind of become numb to it,” he said. “It actually took me a couple of years after I came to realize that wasn't the norm.”